Amazon’s Kindle Fire will make or break Android

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In the next couple of months, just in time for Christmas, Amazon will release its much-touted tablet. We don’t know its name, and we know scant few other details, but we do know enough to form a succinct, if blurry, picture. For a start, we know that this tablet — the Kindle Fire — will not be an iPad 2 competitor. We’re also fairly certain that the Kindle Fire will be priced at $250, or possibly even less — it will be an upgrade from the $189 Kindle 3G, in other words — and as we know from the $99 HP TouchPad fire sale, a low cost might be the key to success in the Apple-dominated tablet market.

From the price point, we can surmise that most of the cost savings will come from a smaller display and touchscreen assembly, probably around the 8-inch ballpark, or perhaps even smaller — 6-inch, like the size of a Kindle. With regards to the rest of the hardware, it will most likely feature a cost-effective OMAP SoC from TI, which brings all of the usual connectivity options — and it’s fairly safe to assume that there’ll be a cheap Wi-Fi variant, and costlier 3G “Whispernet” version.

Most importantly, though, Amazon’s new tablet will run the Android operating system; a highly-customized version of Android, no doubt, but still fundamentally Android. This is either fantastically awesome or a cataclysmically devastating for Android, depending on your point of view. On the positive side, Amazon is one of the biggest retailers in the world, and the success of the Kindle will almost certainly be mirrored by the Kindle Fire, which will be advertised on every page of the Amazon website and on a glossy leaflet inside every Amazon box.

It’s true that the Amazon Appstore for Android hasn’t been a perfect release, but that’s because it’s a second class citizen on smartphones; on the Amazon tablet, the exact opposite will be true. You see, if Amazon goes down the custom-build route — which it surely will — it will ensure that all of its first-party services are front and center. The Android Market will be replaced by the Amazon Appstore. Instead of the default Music app, there’ll be Amazon MP3, with its built-in Amazon Cloud Player functionality. There’s a Kindle for Android app, too — and yes, if you needed confirmation, you can be 100% sure that the Kindle Fire will be a first-rate e-book reader. You could even imagine Amazon releasing some kind of “catalog” app, which would let Kindle Fire users order stuff from Amazon with just a few finger prods.

On the end-is-nigh side of the equation, though, there’s no avoiding the fact that Amazon’s custom build of Android will be a fork. We don’t know the exact details, but basically Amazon will have taken Android 2.2 or 2.3 — both of which were released as part of the Android Open Source Project — and rolled its own version. Because of Android’s Apache license, Amazon doesn’t even have to share the changes it makes. In other words, when the Kindle Fire emerges, there will be two very distinct branches of Android: Google’s web-oriented version, and Amazon’s highly-customized Amazon-oriented version.

Now, we have to assume — to begin with — that Amazon’s Android build will be fully backwards compatible with the thousands of Android 1.0 and 2.0 smartphone apps and games. It might even be compatible with the handful of extant Honeycomb apps; Amazon can’t market a tablet that has no apps, after all. If the Kindle Fire is successful, though, and Amazon continues to develop and further specialize its Amazoid fork, cross-platform compatibility will almost certainly suffer.

At this point, app developers will have to choose their target carefully: the massively successful but poorly monetizable Android smartphones; the weak “iPad killer” Android tablets; or Amazon’s cheap-and-cheerful Kindle Fire. There are too many variables to predict how that little scenario will pan out, but just the sheer possibility that Amazon is about to go head-to-head with Google will be causing some sleepless nights in and around the Googleplex, and some very heated CEO-level discussions throughout the technology industry.

If all that wasn’t terrifying enough, here’s another thought: if Kindle Fire is a success, there’s nothing stopping Amazon from distributing its version of Android to other tablet and e-book reader manufacturers. All of the features are built into the software, after all, not the tablet — so Amazon has very little to lose by sharing its OS, and millions of new Kindle, MP3, and Appstore users to gain.

Finally, with the dark pall of patent litigation hanging over Google and Android, Amazon’s version of Android might actually be reworked to remove offending blocks of code. Amazon might also have obtained licensing agreements from Oracle, Microsoft, and others that indemnifies Amazoid OEMs and developers from feeling the sharp brunt of patent warfare.

In short, Amazon’s upcoming tablet, if it’s a success, will probably kill off the nascent Android Honeycomb tablets. It’s unlikely to affect the Android smartphone market — but the option of a cheaper, feature-rich, well-supported and easy-to-use tablet could definitely make a dent in Apple’s meteoric iPad sales.

Wow I’ve heard of apple fan-boys before but never an Amazon fan-boy. You’re kidding yourself if you think this amazon “ereader plus” is going make a dent in the android landscape at all. Everyone knows that amazon is a joke in the android community especially their completely broken app store. There’s no way it will make any difference against apple sales either, and I can’t stand apple products myself.

Interesting perspective. I question how many people agree with you, since the people I know who are thinking about tablets are thinking if the Amazon entry provides fair tablet usability (with the obligatory eReader functionality) in the $250 range, they’ll probably buy. Obviously, the tablet usability issue will be critical.

Anonymous

a lot of good points in this post. could sum up that “Amazon will fragment Android tablets.”

but the biggest impact of all was missed – Amazon will push the price down a lot, and from now on any Android tablet will have to match that lowered market level. depending on size and components, from $250 – $350 (plus a bump for extra storage, 3G/LTE , etc.). no one is going to spend $400+ on an Android tablet after this, they’ll get an iPad.

Asus and Acer already offer cheap Android 2.x tablets in this price range now too, but the problem is, they suck. they will have to get them up to Amazon-grade snuff or abandon the market.

this is what is known as “the race to the bottom.” Amazon will be happy to sell tablets at cost, just to feed its web retail empire, and yes, maybe give away the OS for free, like Google does to feed its advertising empire. which means, btw, Google will have to do the same thing with Motorola tablets – sell them at cost.

but all the other Android OEM’s are screwed. selling at cost is obviously a terrible long term business plan. and trying to complete with vertically integrated companies with substantial ecosystems they don’t have is doom.

Samsung and Sony won’t give up – they keep trying, poorly, to integrate their other A/V hardware into ecosystems too – but the rest, bye-bye.

Asus Transformer is the best tablet for money you can buy and why it is the best selling Android tablet world wide.

The only thing the ipad2 has on the Transformer is being thinner/lighter. But if you stripped down the Asus to limit the ports like Apple did, they’d be just as thin/light.

However, since the Transformer has HMDI ports, removable storage, and the excellent keyboard dock with additional storage and ports, the Transformer is a legitimate laptop replacement, while the ipad2 will forever remain a toy.

motley.slate

Nice try, but you are too uninformed to lay out the tablet landscape for us. Asus and Acer tablets are Android 3.x, aka Honeycomb, not Android 2.x. The lower priced Amazon tablet is not likely to touch these in quality. If they somehow sell a 10 inch tablet at cost and they do match the quality of the Asus Transformer and Acer Iconia, they will sell off the shelves and iPad will have a serious contender on their hands.

Remember, iPad = no flash player, no standard USB port, no standard HDMI port, no SDCard…it’s a closed and limited system, albeit a well designed one. HP Touchpads will likely soon be running Android as well thus making the Android camp even larger. Apple has contenders, but the fan boys and paid off tech mags like to pretend they don’t exist. It easily works for the sheeple who don’t have a handle on what is really going on. They walk around spreading the news even though they don’t have a clue. There will still be a market for higher end Android tablets, trust me, there are buyers out there for whomever wins the Android tablet battle. There just may not be room for all the current Honeycomb players.

Anonymous

I haven’t seen anyone attempt a breakdown of sales on the HPs, but at a guess I would estimate at least a third were sold to geeks hoping to run Android (or something else) on them. If the ‘Kindle Tab’ is easily tweaked to run stock Android (or Cyanogenmod, pretty-please), I expect there will be a large geek market, though we may not do much for Amazon’s bottom line…

This might be more appealing once a proper, tabletified version of Android is open sourced — but the idea of putting Android 2.3 on a TouchPad seems very counterintuitive.

Cyanogenmod is working on a tablet version (of 2.3, I guess) for the TouchPad — we’ll see how it goes.

Anonymous

yeah, all those TouchPads were snapped up by techies/hobbyists. basically, a new $99 toy for them. routine “consumers” didn’t even have a clue there was a big firesale. so how many total did HP dump? probably less than a million.

this kind of one-off event proves NOTHING about the market, except that you can sell a million digital toys to gadget lovers for $99.

more indicative of the consumer market is the Nook Color, which is a modest success as a quite limited but basic small tablet for $249. this is presumably Amazon’s goal for a Kindle Tablet. we’ll see how big the market for these really is.

HP didn’t build anywhere close to 1MM Touchpads. I suspect they didn’t even build 100K as sales were absolutely horrific. At $99, they are a throw away device for a minuscule market of geeks or the most clueless.

Anonymous

I don’t know how many Touchpads HP built, but there were several news items (or maybe one news item quoted several places) that a couple weeks ago Best Buy was sitting on an unsold quarter million of them. Does anybody have real knowledge of total number of Touchpads built?

Cameron Cole

The Amazon tablet will neither make nor break Android Tablets. That ship is moving out of the harbor and like Android phones will eventually become a major player in the landscape regardless of how an Amazon tablet is received. Google has plenty of resources to push the product indefinitely, a hardware company under their wing to deploy from and an established base of fans. Amazon could speed all that up but they cannot “break” Android.

Also the cost of Android tablets will inevitably come down as cost of manufacturing decreases. Apple will continue to live on huge margins while Android tablet makers continue to see decreases in their costs and lower their entry price into the market.

Apple may be head of the tablet class right now, but like they once were with PCs and phones so will come a day when their tablet marketshare is no longer king of the hill.

Apple is no longer head of class in tablets. Samsung’s Galtab 10.1 is better (and why apple is fighting so hard to keep it out of the market).

And Asus’ Transformer is king of the tablet hill as far as I’m concerned. Better in every respect – battery life, usability, screen, flash, open source and most importantly, no detestable iTune$.

Anonymous

It’s funny to read the ‘knee jerk’ reactions about emerging technologies. When I heard of iPhones and DROIDS, I said “its JUST a frigging phone”… Now I am addicted to the “Market”, “Paradise Island” and my doorbell app to drive my Yorkies crazy… I heard of iPads and Tablets… I was like “that’s what a laptop is for”… now I find myself pining for my wife to put down her iPad2 so I can tinker with it… When Kindle and other “eReaders” were out… I wanted to feel a book in my hands… now with my Kindle I’ve downloaded all the works of Jules Verne (only cost me $14) in one swoop from the comfort of my home and ‘read’ it every night.

People said “Android wont make it where Apple…” and look at them now…. I guess my point is, as my parents always told me, that “you don’t know if you like it unless you try it…”… besides liver and onions… it works…

I would not be so fast to dismiss Amazon. As they already have a large backing of Kindle users (several of us in the office is considering making a Kindle Club) and the financial means to make it happen. I am not 100% sold on running out to the store to by a new “K2” as I am cheap and just spent $189 for my “Whispernet” edition… but should I need a replacement… as long as they run with the awesome “eInk” technology the Kindle has… but in color… I’ll take one. Especially if they are within my “price point”.

Anonymous

Re: Jules Verne — Why on earth would you pay one penny for books in the public domain?

WOW, do people actually get paid to write this disillusion crap? I love Android, but the assumption that Amazon can change anything about Android, other than selling many, more is idiotic. Amazon can only help the Android market.

Anonymous

Haha, agreed. It’s so sad to still see things like this in a post apple era.

LOL you said it. There are more Android devices sold than iOS devices. Android is already more prevalent than iOS. Amazon wont make or break ANYTHING about Android. It’s funny that anyone still questions Android… It’s the biggest phone OS in the world… and people are still questioning it? Though Android started YEARS after iOS, they’re almost – if not already – caught up. I do believe Android has some distance to go before it will be as polished as iOS, but in other ways it’s better than iOS – but in general I think iOS is prettier and more uniform regarding the OS. Just wait until the Android OS is running not only your phone, but your radio/boombox/media player sitting on your shelf(it’s coming), your TV(already here), your refrigerator, your car(Google’s self driving car – you better believe they’ll have android with a nice large touchscreen in there)… Look at how Google’s doing it, it’s amazing… They’ll have Android in everything not too far into the future.

Gareth David

Actually Android was created a couple of years before the Apple phone OS, now known as iOS. The public release of Android was however a couple of months after the Apple phone OS…

You understand that an Amazon Tablet probably won’t even have access to the Android Market?

Android Market is _only_ available to Android devices that closely adhere to Google’s rules — which is why you have to hack it onto Wi-Fi media slates like the Archos gizmos.

_Anyone_ can change Android, that’s the whole point of open source — and the Apache license. Amazon isn’t just going to limp into the tablet arena, man; they will do exactly what they did with the Kindle.

It might not work, true — but if anything the iPad has shown that people are willing to give tablets a try… and at $250 (or cheaper!) I think Amazon tablets will fly off the shelves.

Amazon will only broaden the market – no sense in releasing a tablet that doesn’t run tablet-optimized Honeycomb – releasing in near-obsolete 2.3 is the kiss of death, with Ice Cream Sandwich devices just about to arrive. If they do release in 2.3, I doubt the market will treat the tablet too kindly unless they give the thing away with subsidized prices. But I don’t know what the business case for doing that would be – just selling apps in the app store and the odd ebook?

James Thomas

I’m surprised that no one has even mentioned the Nook Color. It also runs a highly customized version of Android. In fact every B&N Nook has had a customized version of Android. No one was saying the “sky is falling” with those and I think you will be the only one saying that this time too.

Anonymous

Interesting predictions, Sebastian. We’ll just have to see.. I’m not a fan of Android in general (I feel their security policies are sub-par, and their Market is the wild west, but that’s just me) But if Amazon’s highly customized tablet is secured any better, I may take a look at it. If it can allow me to listen to audiobooks and read along with the same ebook, it would be a tablet I may consider. Don’t know of any tablet or ereader that can do that.

Amazon is probably the only company that has a chance of coming anywhere close to apple in terms of sales of tablets. For their sake I hope it’s good!

Anonymous

I hope amazon does not lock up the kindle / tablet the way apple locked theirs up.
i think price is a big factor, the apple stuff is good , no question , but a lot of folks like me are just not going to pay that price. i will accept a SLIGHTLY lower quality machine for a LOT lower price.

Anonymous

In your wet iDreams.

This is like saying, during the 1990’s: “ACER’s next desktop will make or break the PC!” What absolute bilge.

No, it won’t. It’s a consumer device, not an OS proving ground. If it bombs, the conclusion will be that Amazon did a poor job of creating a niche sub-platform for Android among industry insiders, and the conclusion among tech-users who don’t know the internals will be that Amazon did a bad job with the new Kindle+, PERIOD.

If it succeeds, Amazon will be under serious pressure to add all the features and functionality of a real tablet, at which point Amazon will need to decide if they want to go all-in in the OS/Platform biz, or if manufacturing technology has brought down the cost of fully featured tablets to the point that they can lateral to the latest Android version while still locking into their own device branding. Neither choice is a “make or break” for Android.

Get over it: Apple is headed for niche status against an open platform, because Apple is making the same mistake it made in 1985. The draconian constraints Apple puts on developer licensing, the gawd-awful development environment, and the overpricing of their hardware against other manufacturers mean that eventually iOS devices are headed for the same market share as the Mac.

Nook Color Android-based tablet/eReader from Barnes & Noble has been on the market for over a year and sold millions of units at $250. Gives Flash, apps, videos, color magazines and ebooks with video inserts, and the best anti-glare coated screen on the market. Technology “giant” Amazon is finally catching up with the book store company by copying their device.

Apple is coming out with a cheaper version of the ipad early next year so onece that happens the Amazon tablet and any other tablet will not stand a chance to compete. For now, the Amazon Tab will make a great ipad alternative.

That’s crazy to say Amazon Tablet will make or break android but I think it will be a great alternative to ipad.

I wish there was a good windows tablet out but there’s not, I don’t think. I’d much prefer a windows tablet over android or apples. There’s a couple decent ones here but nothing special. http://bestwindowstablet.net

Kindle fire from amazon will kill that green robot? Hmm, maybe it will burn with its “fire” :lol:

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